


Over the Seven Jewelled Hills, Beyond the Seventh Wall

by lilith_morgana



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst and Humor, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Hell, Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23548918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: Hell tastes of brimstone and apple compote.Lucifer is back from Hell, at least physically. Mentally, he appears to be caught in a sleeping death.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar
Comments: 23
Kudos: 117





	Over the Seven Jewelled Hills, Beyond the Seventh Wall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whopooh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whopooh/gifts).



> Written for whopooh who prompted a story in which Lucifer is Snow White.

  
  
_“Oh where, oh where had Snow White gone?  
_ _She'd found it easy, being pretty  
_ _To hitch a ride into the city.”_

 **Roald Dahl,** **Revolting Rhymes**  
  
  
  


* * *

**  
****1.**  
  
Hell tastes of brimstone and apple compote.  
  
He’s _really_ bloody uncertain about the compote part.  
  
Then again, he’s really uncertain about a lot of minor details about Hell, especially now as it declines and morphs into dark tendrils and wobbling threads of nightmares that _reek_ of undissolved terrors.  
  
“That’s a bit harsh,” Hell says. “I’m only trying to please.”  
  
“You were gone for so long,” Hell says. “We’ve all changed.”  
  
“You know what to do,” Hell says. “You’ve got it in you.”  
  
Lucifer closes his eyes, steadies his will.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
He gets stuck, at first, in the incomprehensible shape of things:  
  
In the harsh solitude of the Silver City, the absence of it a dark current in the middle of his chest, his unadulterated contempt for it even darker.  
  
In the dawn of humanity - their toil and trouble, the unexpected grief at the sight of them making their way down to him, all the little engineers of mortal catastrophes. _I don’t want their souls, Father. I never wanted their souls._ _  
_  
In the human-constructed palaces and castles and in the hedonism they apparently demand, in the artificial lights and the even more artificial drugs. It’s an honest, _raw_ sort of lust; he places his mouth over the pulsating vein of human life and bleeds it dry.   
In the easy friendship of an aspiring musician at Lux, a lost soul wrapping her arms around his neck, her trust around his tired old bones. In the vague, scattered stabs of guilt at her fate and his part in it. His part in _all_ of it.  
  
In the terrible mass of corpses raised by his subjects and then left to their fate, the stench of Hell soiling the streets of what he still thinks of home, despite everything he's inflicted on it or because of it. _You destroy everything you love, Samael._  
  
In Chloe’s mouth lit by the soft light emerging from his wings - _you’re also an angel_ \- as he exiles himself.  
  
In the cold, absolute horror of returning to a Hell that he had no longer recognised, that had no longer recognised him. The efforts made to reconnect himself to it, the taste of bile and blood in his mouth. The demons and their hierarchies - the ones long forgotten and now lost, the ones reaffirmed by his presence, the ones completely destroyed.  
  
In the terrifying multitudes he contains, swarming at his feet.  
  
In the voices of Hell as it cracks.  
  
  
\---  
  
  


He gets stuck, at last, in those voices, the choir of Hell.  
  
It doesn’t protest when he alters it, never has, but it _responds_. It hadn’t liked his first versions - _too sentimental, even for you_ \- or his adventures into the various literal interpretations created on Earth; he could feel the wounded disapproval during the Middle Ages of humanity when Lucifer rained brimstone and fire everywhere - _I am so much more complex than that, my lord_ ; it has gently coaxed him out of a few make-overs and accepted others, it has reshaped itself into every concept he has ever had.  
  
It has never behaved like _this_ under his metaphorical hands.  
  
He tears down the pillars of red rock leading up to his throne. They fall down and build themselves up again, instantly.  
  
He forces the sky to open up, furiously and vainly and despite knowing that the only thing behind the sky here in Hell is _more_ Hell, infinite layers of it. Now it opens to give him a glimpse of the stars but then it closes on itself, over and over again.  
  
He melts the ice, makes the waters boil with heat; moments later everything is frozen.  
  
Whatever he does, the hell-spawn - the basest, most vile demonic creatures that he brought into the deep himself, the twisted children of the angels that fell with him - keep coming. It’s fury that drives them, he can see it in their eyes. Fury and blood and they’re coming for Hell, for Earth _,_ for _her_.  
  
Lucifer blinks, hands curling into fists. How human LA has made him; how inhuman he is.  
  
_Lucifer, this is your home, I’ve always been on your side_ , Hell soothes him in gentle notes accompanied by the quick smile of Chloe dancing past his vision before he crashes into Hell's burning edges, tearing them down with the power resting in the celestial core of him, the undiluted source of might that both thrills and terrifies him.  
  
_Ta ‘vonlu’_ , Hell whispers in a voice that is Azrael’s low and beckoning memory of a past where they were stone-carved creatures without childhood stumbling like children all the same; whispers in a voice that is Mother’s demanding love, Father’s lack of it; whispers in a voice that is Ella’s amused ramblings scattered like neon lights during a fast car-ride back from Vegas. _Honestly, Lucifer? How can you have lived for a… reasonable number of years and not have seen Star Trek?_ _Three-dimensional chess?_ _Ta ’ vonlu’_.  
  
The king is trapped.  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
Maze arrives first, bruised and bloodied; she whacks her blades, all three of them, into the floor of Chloe’s apartment and _screams_ . First in English, then in Lilim, then in something else, something guttural and full of a wrath that knows no words.  
  
“He threw me out.” 

Chloe blinks. Her hands clench and unclench at her sides.  
  
Amenadiel is the second one to arrive, his wings burnt and his face blank with disbelief. 

"Hell is falling apart," he says. Chloe can't tell if the edge in his voice originates from fear or anticipation. _Admiration_ ?  
  
Five hours later Lucifer finally appears, a wordless, voiceless _thud_ on the floor, mere inches from the marks that Maze's blades had created. 

He doesn't speak, he doesn't move. 

He doesn't - _anything_.

  
  


**2.**  
  


He's in the Silver City.

It smells of myrrh and opium, of honey and whiskey - the richest, smokiest flavour, the only one he can't drink like water, the one that gives him delicious _pause._ The air is warm, touching their bodies like caresses and every source of light is dim and pleasant as they scatter through the tall windows that surround him. 

Chloe stretches beside him, fingertips brushing over his chest. 

"No manscaping in Heaven?" She grins, wickedly. “Suits you.”  
  
The surge inside him as her mouth opens over his nipple, the back of her tongue so insistent, so _promising._ Her scent - skin and soap, deep, earthy notes of a perfume he cannot remember on her before - lingers everywhere, like fog or rain and he wants it, all of it, desires its very purpose. Chloe gasps a little at his enthusiasm and he runs his hand along her spine, tracing the core of her, pressing her into his memory.  
  
There’s a tear in his mind. Something slipping out of reach, escaping just around a corner that he can’t see. And the quiet dread rising in him is both horrifyingly familiar and utterly new.  
  
_Stop._  
  
“Hey,” Chloe says, “don’t go.”  
  
Ignoring her plea he pulls himself out of the sensation, regretting it terribly. There’s a peace here that he has never known, a resting place for all sorts of doubt and the grief in that fact, in the knowledge it brings forth, causes physical pain. 

"This isn't real." Lucifer looks up at the stars visible through the window, the wide stretch of history above them, the eroded bliss of creation. He was made here, all the winding roads of his origin lead back to the endless light of God and it breaks him in places where his heart would be.  
  
_This is not for me._

"No," she agrees. She sounds a little sad, or perhaps it's him, projecting. _Damn you, Linda_. No, it’s not.”  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  


“His vitals are good,” the nurse says softly to Linda who looks at Chloe across the room where Chloe is wrapped around Trixie in a narrow armchair.  
  
Linda nods. She looks decidedly calmer now that they have arrived at the hospital, after a long debate. This is where she puts her trust, pours it into the ticking machines and its operators. _  
_  
“We’re right outside.” The nurse pats Linda’s shoulder quickly, in passing.  
  
Chloe wants to say that they ought to speak to _her_ , that Lucifer is _hers_ , but she doesn’t. The emotion it brings - an open rift, a black hole - is too vast for words; she holds it at bay, holds herself together.   
  
“We should take him home,” Trixie mumbles, lips trembling against Chloe’s throat. She’s so small, suddenly. Which she isn’t, not anymore, not ever again, but here in the face of this she is childlike and protective the way she used to be when Dan and Chloe were both running night shifts and Trixie had made them swear on all the planets and stars and grandma’s special - store bought - chocolate cupcakes that they’d come back safe before dawn. They’d swear, solemnly. Crossed their hearts and hoped to make it through another night and swallowed the slight discomfort of lying to their child. _We’ll always come back to you, munchkin_. “He’d want to be home.”

  
  
  
  


**3.  
  
**

He's in Hell. 

And it somehow feels like the first time again, the deepest cut of the place, a vein laid bare.  
  
“Hush now,” Hell had said an eternity ago. Had spoken gently through the falling ashes and glittering ice, through the hot winds that had wanted to tame him and curve him towards the core of his new kingdom. He had battled his destiny for an eon, grieved it even longer. And then Hell, in soft whispers, had soothed him like a devoted father. “No more war, Samael. Let me tell you a story. Pick a cell, give me a number.”  
  
Each tale, every fate had tasted different, ripe with guilt and agony and desire, with adventure, love and hate and he had devoured them all like the hedonistic creature he is.  
  
“Aren't we all, dear,” Hell had murmured, almost lovingly.  
  
Chloe walks up to the barriers separating the lakes from its shores. Or one of the things and some of the time. It never looks exactly the same. She turns towards him, smiling slightly.  
  
“Did you make it?” Chloe brushes a strand of hair from her face, her thumb momentarily tracing over her lower lip, in passing, as if unnoticed. “Hell, I mean. I’ve always wondered.”  
  
“No. It made itself. It was already alive.” Lucifer runs the back of his hand across his forehead and scoffs at the flakes of soot catching on the scorched skin and all its deformities. “I suppose I decorated it.”  
  
“Well, I don’t love what you’ve done with the place, then.” A chuckle, brittle as a breath. It shatters against its own weight.  
  
“You’re not meant to.” His voice tightens over the horror of seeing her - suddenly _seeing_ her - against this backdrop, in this wretched place. “Oh, Chloe. You’re not _meant_ to be here.”  
  
“Ah well.” She sounds vaguely uninterested in his protests. “Dream logic, right? I mean, I know for sure it’s a dream when you call me ‘Chloe’.”  
  
“Chloe,” he says again, speaks her name again like a mantra or a prayer; she takes a few steps closer, standing on tiptoe to meet his gaze. Her eyes are so pale here, are glittering shadows. It’s the look of the departed, rubbing off on her. He needs to banish her somehow before it sticks.  
  
_A dream_ \- as though her presence in Hell isn’t a nightmare in itself.  
  
She reaches out for him, a hand almost touching his cheek and he flinches. It hurts. Oh, she _hurts._  
  
The stench and despair of his beastly appearance sits like a hard knot of grief in his chest. A fitting punishment, all things considered, to let the darkness inside manifest. He'll give Dad that. _Mirror, mirror, here I stand. Who is the fairest in the land?_ He is vain by creation - by choice if he ever had one - and proud, so very proud. That’s what they all said, their eyes glittering as they crowded around his exile, _gloating_ . Never had he been less alone in Heaven than in those last moments before he fell. Never before had his existence touched as many creatures. He can pretend for millennia that it hadn’t devastated him, he can deflect with a smile, a bargain, a _dare_ , but he can’t run from this. The bottomless sorrow of his fate.  
  
The scorched skin of his face is like a country and her eyes become gentle cartographers writing his story of defeat. That she has to endure this, that he expects her to endure _him_ . Lucifer draws a ragged breath that breaks on his lips, a fragment of something he cannot even pronounce.

It's a relief when she vanishes into thin air.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
“Can I talk to him? Can he hear me?” He’s back at Lux again, back home and nobody will ever move him again, she’s sworn it to his sleeping body.  
  
“I don’t know.” Amenadiel’s voice is low and kind, a murmur into the brittle air. She braces herself against it. “But there is no harm in trying.”  
  
“Are you saying that because he’s a… demiurge?” She looks up for confirmation of the unfamiliar, somehow _raw_ term; Amenadiel nods. “That because he is, he can do this? And stay like this? Is there a time limit?”  
  
Of _course_ there’s a time limit, but time, she knows by now, isn’t linear to someone like him. Isn’t _linear_ and the facts of it crash into her with a force that is blinding. How long has it been, for him? How long will it be? He had been so lonely she could smell it on him, the first time they met. Surrounded, glittering like a star and such a solitary being that he broke her heart already back when she didn’t even _like_ him.  
  
“I’m not sure, Chloe.” There’s a pause. “This isn’t something that has ever happened before.”  
  
A flickering light outside followed by the sound of brakes accompany them as Chloe reaches for the blanket to adjust it better over Lucifer’s legs. Her heart breaks with each move, with all the wrong angles and all the gestures out of tune.   
  
Her hands need other memories of his body.  
  
“I just want him back. You know?” Lucifer’s skin is rough from the burns that are healing slower than she would have imagined yet so much faster than the doctors seem to be comfortable with behind their professionally neutral faces. It’s been nine days. It’s been an eternity. “I want him _here_.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**4.** **  
** **  
** “I don’t understand why you’re here. I’m trying to wage a war on Hell.” He takes a deep breath. “You’re a complication.”  
  
“Maybe I’m your Beatrice?” A spark of laughter glitters in the corner of her eye.  
  
Lucifer shakes his head. “You never got any further than Dante in your research, did you, darling?”  
  
Dream Chloe - or Nightmare Chloe, though he can’t bring himself to think of her that way - is perched on a rock formation out in a small fjord of frozen lava. He doesn’t ask how she got there. She doesn’t ask how lava can freeze; he wonders if he could explain. It’s been a while since he pondered the metaphysical planes of this realm and its many erratic - occasionally thrilling - contradictions.  
  
“Are we going down your memory lane, is that why I’m here? It seems very PG-13 so far.” He notices that her eyes widen slightly, as if they stumble on a sudden insight. “Oh, is _that_ the punishment down here for you?"  
  
Somewhere in the wide distance, Hell chuckles.  
  
“I can assure you it’s not.”  
  
She holds up a glowing-red pebble, spins it around in her palm. If she was real, that would leave burn marks. Around them and above them, out in the vast fields of the dead, the demons march. Don’t they? There is no noise emerging from anywhere. Lucifer’s eyes are dry from exhaustion. It isn’t reasonable - Hell _has_ no concept of sleep, at least nothing that translates to human terms, yet he feels like he could do just that, for hundreds of years. Just sleep.  
  
That does not seem to be the case with his temporary companion. 

“Where do you keep the worst offenders?" She reaches for another pebble. "I’ve been meaning to ask.”  
  
“ _I_ keep no one.” Has he not told her this before? Have they not spoken of his reign, his assigned duty back when she tried to let Father Kinley have him? Time blurs, chafes inside his consciousness. Hell can crowd eternity into an hour, or stretch an hour into eternity. It shatters your memories and rebuilds them, like little demons. “They keep themselves here.”  
  
“Fair enough. But I meant the… cells? The circles? My terminology is probably way off-”  
  
“There are no special places in hell,” he cuts her off. “Hell is a democracy.”  
  
“ _Really_ ?” Chloe frowns, fixing him with her gaze and suddenly he is less certain.  
  
All the stories here are wrong-sided, every word stumped. The lives twist around each other, flooding and falling away like water and the souls grasp at thin air trying to make them _stay_ .  
  
The same way he’s making her stay.  
  
He takes her to the rivers and mountains, he flies her to the desolate throne. It looks different every time, all of it. She never asks why but he tells her anyway, tells her that time and space are extensions of the mind, the will; tells her that infinity is a subjective and local phenomenon. Tells her that her Hell, Father forbid she will ever have to see it, would be different from his.  
  
Chloe, true to her nature even in Hell, nods and takes notes in a little notepad that must have escaped the ever-blazing hellfires through some miraculous intervention.   
  
He tells her the stories of the realm he rules, tells her: _once upon a time in the middle of eternity, when the flakes of snow were falling like feathers from the sky, a God sat in a Silver City sewing._ She laughs, a low, dark sound that runs down his spine.  
  
He takes her to all the places he can imagine down in this stumped existence; she asks the questions of a tourist at first, asks where and when and how; then, bolder, about the demons, the angels, the fundamentals of his reign. She asks: if Dante was wrong about Hell, then who was right?  
  
“The Bible? Mom's cousin the televangelist? Oh, was it Milton? Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven, right?” 

Lucifer looks at her in the light of the deep-frozen lakes that gleams dully, the crisp air around them sending silvery dust into her hair.  
  
“This version of you is so intellectual,” he says. He doesn’t mean for the words to sound wistful.  
  
“Do you like it?” The corners of her mouth are twitching, a fluttering grin passes by. “I figured it would suit one of me. Do you wish the real Chloe was?”  
  
He shakes his head, the answer spilling out quick and easy, like curses, _kisses_. “I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”  
  
  
\---  
  
  


They _are_ , as it happens, walking down his memory lane. Mostly by accident, courtesy of the dynamic nature of Hell's geography. (It’s one of the things they argue the most about; Hell claims it’s charming or possibly eccentric, Lucifer claims it’s infuriating. Nobody ever wins the argument.)  
  
In the south-western part of Hell, there’s a little garden he’s never seen before, a hortus conclusus wedged in between lakes of lava and the grandiose golden bridge leading up to the Fields of Eternity. He approaches it too carelessly to resist its allure and the rest is history, both old and new. Hell is nothing if not ironic in the most exhausting way.  
  
“What is it with you and gardens anyway?” Chloe walks up beside him.

"A design flaw, it seems."  
  
  
\---  
  


  
He walks out of Heaven without looking back, his injured limbs moving like torn wings, shuddering and fractured.  
  
“I don’t remember it this way,” he says. It’s something about the colours that is wrong, something in the outlines.  
  
Chloe taps her fingertips over the places between his shoulder blades where he once carried scars.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
He buries his brother, over and over again.  
  
He remembers Uriel’s contempt in the Silver City, remembers the bitter taste of unalterable law. He remembers the weight of his brother’s dead body in his arms. Did he know it would end this way? Had the pattern been there already, like ciphers on Lucifer’s skin?  
  
“This isn’t right,” he tells Chloe, who studies something on the ground besides the makeshift grave. “We shouldn’t be here.”  
  
  
\---  
  
  


He kills Cain while Chloe watches.  
  
“I thought you were an angel. When you saved me from his men-” She lowers her gaze; this is the first time she has looked anything but provokingly peaceful in Hell, the first time he can read human Chloe’s awkwardness and honesty in her face. It almost brings him to his knees. “I wanted you to be one.”  
  
“I know.” Lucifer touches her face; it burns under his hand. He doesn’t say that angels are carved from the hardest material in the universe, that they are untouchable, _unloveable_ . “So did I.”  
  
She smiles until it feels like something inside him breaks. “This is okay, too.”  
  
Her mouth tastes of salt and honey and he drowns in the illusion.  
  


\---  
  
  
He stands in front of Father’s throne room, sword unsheathed in his hand.  
  
There is blood on his hands and stone in his chest.  
  
_Let there be no dominion over me_ ; oh he had flown so high, had been so _sure_ .   
  
There is nothing left of him once he leaves this place, there is nothing unsullied, nothing that remains of Samael, God’s favourite son and he wants to think _good riddance, dad_ but instead his knees give in, instead his sword drops to the floor, instead there is salt in his mouth and blood all over the marble as he holds himself upright by the strength of his fists.  
  
Chloe’s touch makes him jerk away in disgust; she bites down on her lower lip, but says nothing.  
  
  
\---  
  
  


For Julian Tiernan’s near-death, Chloe sneaks up behind Lucifer, a ghost to match the Eve that occasionally keeps him company down here. A temptress of his own making, much darker the second time around, her voice spinning threads all around his destiny, breathing fire into the hollow parts of him and oh, there are hollows there as vast as the universe itself and where there aren’t, he carves new ones just to fit her into his life. _Like to try it, hm? Go on, go on, have a bite._  
  
He had eaten her out on a ruined half-wall in a secluded back alley, once Julian was down.  
  
Her fingers twisting in his hair, the highs of his power-rush sending them both off loud and fast and desperate; he had anonymously called an ambulance with Eve still rocking against him - even then it had felt filthy albeit _delightfully_ so because he was _right_ , justice had been served.  
  
“I should have killed this vermin,” he says, pushing the memory out of his mind.  
  
“Your conscience seems to disagree,” Chloe points out, terrifyingly _chipper_.  
  
He growls back at her, actually _growls_ and the sound of it, its implications of transformations beyond the ordinary, terrifies him. “Get out!”  
  
“I’m going, I’m going.” She shoots him a lingering glance. “It’s not _my_ fault that your Hell is such a maze of self-loathing.”  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
“He died and went to Hell for you, Decker.” Maze sits by the panorama window, juggling a knife and a pair of scissors and Chloe’s instinct is to tell her to stop it but she’s barely awake, hasn’t reached her moral high-ground just yet.  
  
“ _Uh_ .” She straightens in her seat instead, raking a hand through her hair. “What?”  
  
There’s something closed in Maze’s gaze, but her mouth is soft. “Couple of years back. When you were poisoned.”  
  
Chloe swallows. Smooths out a wrinkle on the sheet beneath his body, lets her fingers tamper gently with the hem of one of his expensive shirts that Linda and Maze had convinced the nurses he would keep wearing even at the hospital, to ground him or something like that. _You put him in one of your stupid frocks and I’ll tie your spine around your neck._ Maze’s eyes had been pitch-black lava then, Hell on Earth.  
  
She’s gentler now, watching the King of Hell.  
  
“I didn’t know that,” Chloe says, quietly.  
  
“Yeah.” Maze drops the knife with an ominous rattling noise. She lets it remain on the floor and meets Chloe’s gaze instead. All the unspoken things between them, all the trespasses they’ve committed, the ways they’ve hurt each other. How quickly they pale. “Figured you didn’t. He’d never tell.”  
  
  
  
  
  
**5.**  
  
  
There’s a bar near the northern gates of Hell. He’s never seen it before.   
  
It’s an atrocious mismatch made out of marble and teak and it looks like a tasteless nouveau riche socialite love-bombed it with vulgar decorations - which might very well be true for all he knows. Hell always surprises him, never takes him for granted; it’s the ultimate dysfunctional relationship.  
  
Now, in his quest to finish his war with Hell once and for all, it seems oddly appropriate to find a bar as vulgar as them. ( _Ah, flatterer_ , Hell whispers.)  
  
“Do you think God forgives?” Chloe asks from behind the bar. Her hair is flowing over her shoulders, blonder than he remembers it, a cascade of starlight. She hands him a martini and pours herself a double scotch.  
  
Lucifer scoffs; his breath leaves the glass coated in a flimsy membrane of fog that disappears when he blinks. “I think God has other things to do.”  
  
“Because he hasn’t forgiven you?”  
  
"Contrary to popular belief, not everything’s about me." He downs the drink in one go, refills it immediately. “ _I_ don’t want his forgiveness.”  
  
It’s not a lie. He used to think it was, but it’s not. His exile is a rage that has never found a proper release, a simmering wrath flooding all the corners of his mind but he doesn’t want Father to take it from him, he has so little left without it.   
  
“What _do_ you want then?” Chloe looks thoughtful as she cleans the bar with a towel with pink flamingos printed all over it. He withholds a joke about those, helps himself to another drink. “From your father?”  
  
She waits. Hell waits. Lucifer looks over Chloe’s shoulder and sees the pillars of stone that he imagines are fixed spots of this creation, despite knowing better. There’s just something about them that feels eternal, transgressing both time and space. Like her, he supposes, or her anachronistic, harrowing appearances in his realm. She inhabits him; he cannot force her out.  
  
“I rebelled against creation, Chloe. I started a war in Heaven, fought my own brothers and sisters. It’s not like I did all that just to spite him. And I’m not sorry. I did it because it was _right_ .”  
  
_Among other things_.   
  
“But?”  
  
“But,” he rubs the bridge of his nose, reaching for the Martini again. “ _Look_ at you.”  
  
“ _Well_. You didn’t have to pick LA.” Chloe sounds amused. “If you wanted to feel reassured about free will. You could have settled down in, I don’t know - Reykjavik? They have clean air and low crime-rates.”   
  
“Ah, yes, but the sex and the drugs and the sex and the Hollywood. Yes, I said sex twice.”  
  
For a little while, with the threats of Hell safely in the distance, he can pretend they’re on Earth, sitting in a car during stakeout and passing time with banter and over-the-top flirting. They were always good at that.

Here, instead, they sit in the bar for half an eternity, talking about nothing and everything, the way he's only ever talked to her. She pours Martini, nods towards the south where her Hell emerges: she tells him about late trains and crowded parks, suburban small talk and fashion - _oh darling_ , he thinks - and about play-dates - _they’re really boring, okay, don’t judge me_ \- and endless crime, unsolvable, _unnecessary_. An absurd, exaggerated dollhouse version of her planet, supervised by a bored deity that turned away a long time ago. _Ring any bells, Dad?_

"You were right about the nature of Hell," she concludes. "My version has much less brimstone than yours."

Lucifer nods, rotates the glass in his hand. "But the _play-dates_ , detective." 

Chloe's laughter is a string of light scattered across the bar. He wants to touch her, run his hands along the contours of her body, all the curves and planes of it, to ground her here with him. 

_Stay with me_ , he thinks as he readies himself to cast her out, once and for all, from this wretched kingdom of ashes that he wishes for no one.   
  
“Oh no,” she says. “You’re not throwing me out again.”  
  
“ _Lucifer_ ,” she says, sharper when he dissolves the entrances she must have arrived through, drowns them in the lakes nearby.  
  
“You can’t get trapped here, I don’t know what will happen if you do.”  
  
“ _You’re_ trapped, Lucifer.”

"I’m not,” he says, hoping at least that it’s still true. “Maybe the body on Earth is, but it won’t kill me. I'd just let it rest there for a while."

"Yeah,” Chloe says and her voice is trembling now, her gaze a little unsteady as she looks at him. “I'm not trusting any of you celestial beings with the concept of time. A _while_ for you is what...like, the rest of my life?"  
  
He draws a breath, exhales slowly.  
  
"More, probably." In his memory she holds him in her arms on a balcony in LA; he can never be certain of anything down here but he is certain of that because in that moment he had embraced his own fate and made a brittle truce with everything unhealed inside him. There and then he had been whole. "But you'd be safe."

Her smile falls flat, there's something broken around its edges. "I'm with the LAPD, I'm never _safe_."  
  
“Chloe Jane Decker,” he says, but he can’t look at her, can’t _move_ her if he lets himself be swayed by her presence. Eventually, his powers gather enough around his will, steady his actions. “I’m using every scrap of power I possess trying to protect you. Get the _hell_ out of here.”

And she does - right in the middle of a sentence she _finally_ does exit with a wounded huff that lingers in the air as he searches the ridiculous bar for another drink. Save the Martini he’s already finished it seems it only has watery ale and sherry.  
  
He shoves the bar into oblivion, too, in the opposite direction of wherever Chloe went.  
  
“Oh, now you’re taking charge,” Hell says approvingly. “There’s my Lord of Me.”  
  
“You’re still going about this the wrong way, though,” Hell adds and Lucifer throws his drinking glass into the newly opened sandwich shop on the other side of the street. It crashes into the ground, disappears into the void that opens up behind it.  
  
“So dramatic,” Hell mutters. “We had begun to like those meatball subs Chloe introduced.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
”Hell is _absent_ ,” she overhears Amenadiel tell Maze a few days later, when the sunset is flooding the penthouse and Chloe pretends to eat noodles from a box. “When I try to locate it, it’s not there.”  
  
Maze paces the floor, a metallic sound of heels and knives occasionally interrupted by Charlie’s cooing sounds. “Yeah.”  
  
“You must have felt that, too?”  
  
Chloe puts down the food and gets to her feet. She meets Maze’s gaze just as Maze looks at Lucifer on the couch, a barely contained frustration tangible on her skin.  
  
"Yeah." She nods. “I feel it in _him_.”

"You're saying...?"

"Looks like it."  
  
“What?” Chloe asks, breathless. Her throat is parched. “What did he _do_?”  
  
Amenadiel inhales sharply. “I suspect he’s sealed Hell by, uh-”  
  
“By trapping it inside himself,” Maze finishes the sentence with a grim look on her face. “He would, the _idiot_. Stupid fucking _demiurge_ showing off.”  
  
“Is he really able to do that?” Amenadiel asks. There’s that wonder in his voice again, the same uncertain edge to it as when he returned bloodied from Hell, some days ago. “Contain all of Hell?”  
  
”Why wouldn’t he be?” Maze sits down, looking at them with her typical mix of impatience and condescension that Chloe would never really _get_ before she understood where it was coming from and started fearing it instead. The ancient, demonic depths of knowledge she possesses. The lack of faith in human capacity. It doesn’t take a demon to feel that way; she supposes a demon would feel it a million times over. “Have you tried to fight him in Hell?” She laughs, darkly. “All your silly spats up here on Earth? Yeah, they don’t count, Amenadiel. At the end of the day Lucifer always tagged along like a dog when you dragged him back to Hell. Made a whole damn show about it but he never fought you down there, not _really_. You wouldn’t sit here if he had.”  
  
Charlie makes an impatient noise and Maze shifts position.  
  
“Hell is his domain,” she continues. “You guys don’t even know half of it. Hell is _his_ , he doesn't rule it, anyone could do that but this is something else. It answers to him, it’s a part of him.”  
  
“The way Heaven is a part of Father.”  
  
“Never been there, can’t compare. But I guess.” Maze studies Charlie’s tiny little fist like it’s one of her blades. An exquisite treasure. “He probably wants to hold the demons there. End their existence, or something. Or you know, disembowel them for breaking his laws about possession-”  
  
Amenadiel shoots Maze a sharp glance; Chloe waves it off. No detail is too gory at this point in time, she’s in too deep.   
  
“So you’re saying that we can’t go down there and get him back?” Chloe stares at the tea cup, at her hands, counts the screams inside her own head.  
  
“ _We_ can’t,” Amenadiel says softly, _kindly_ , and she’s ready to hate him just a little for it when he exchanges a look with Maze who nods. “But I’m starting to think that _you_ might, Chloe.”  
  
Chloe feels the universe wobble under her feet.  
  
  
  
  
  
**6.**  
  
Hell is frustrated.  
  
More specifically: Hell is frustrated with _him_.   
  
Lucifer feels it like a red-hot torrent running besides his own emotions, a thread following along, around and inside, interlacing and entwining.  
  
Down here the Lilim have retreated into the mountains and fortresses, the minor demons have either been defeated or followed their superiors and Lucifer remains here, at a loss for what else to throw at the hell beasts rising from the depths. Like blood flowing from an open wound, they flood his realm.  
  
The hell beasts, the first demons that walked the grounds of Hell.  
  
The hell beasts, his own unintentional creation. _Lesson learned, Dad._ _  
_  
“What do you want?” he asks Hell, _screams_ it, knowing full well that answering questions isn’t part of Hell’s infuriating design. “I’m doing what you told me, I’m fighting off the demons, I’m- What more do you _want_ from me, eh?”  
  
He pushes himself away from the empty lake, as though he could remove himself from the vaguely nagging voice of this place by moving around. He can’t. Never could. The only place where it momentarily quieted had been Earth, with its soft bodies and delightful liquor, its darkly pulsating fear of death keeping it going, always _going_ somewhere else just like him and something inside him had been silent there in the clattering discord.  
  
Now it feels like it’s never been anything but this constant roar; he’s falling into it, overwhelmed.  
  
“Has it ever occurred to you that I’m trying to _tell_ you something?” Hell mutters in the exasperated voice of a parent when Lucifer tears the roof of Chloe’s bar and smashes the empty bottles into a pool of toxic water. The shattered glass burns blue, like everything else.  
  
“Has it ever occurred to you that I’m trying to tell _you_ something?” he shoots back, a petulant child stomping off.  
  
“Thunder only has one thing to say: it tells us how close the storm is,” Hell says, haughtily, after Lucifer in a fit of rage has sealed the entrance to the Tower with the dead bodies of every hell spawn he could find.  
  
_I’ll show you a bloody storm._  
  
If he cannot _morph_ Hell, he decides, he can destroy it, bringing about its final shape. _Dust_. He closes his eyes, steadies his resolve, making himself deaf to the protests. The Lord of Hell will do what he damn well likes.  
  
The force he unleashes knocks him off his feet but he keeps going. Molds the fabric of his own self, the devastating matter of the stars, the planets, the air that holds them in place. He thunders until his form collapses on the ground, dust in his lungs and fire in his heart.   
  
“No, Lucifer,” Hell’s voice is a whisper, a lullaby for the child he’s never been. “ _Lightbringer_. This is not how your story ends.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
The doctor that Dan - very reluctantly - has picked up from the nearby ER looks troubled as she leans over Lucifer’s motionless body.  
  
“There’s no heartbeat,” she says.  
  
“I’m sorry,” she says.  
  
“I’ll make a call,” she says.  
  
Apart from that, the penthouse is silent.  
  
“I think it’s time,” Amenadiel says, his hand warm on Chloe’s shoulder, carrying the weight of the world.  
  
  
  


  
  


**7.**  
  
  
Once upon a time in the Silver City, he is surrounded by angels.  
  
There are stories about them, most of them faded and worn. Humanity has no patience for angels.  
  
Once upon a time, there is a war in Heaven.  
  
There are stories about it, a whole mythology of defeat. It’s written on the inside of his bones, narrated in ancient tomes, painted on walls and screens. Humanity, like Lucifer, lives from war to war; they like their tales bitter and bloody.

Once upon a time, the hell beasts that now crowd the borders of Hell, were his brothers and sisters.  
  
There are no stories about that, only an unhealed wrath that has no language of its own.  
  
“Go on,” Hell says. “Speak their names. You still remember every one.”  
  
  
\---  
  
  
There’s a cavern at the heart of the world sometimes, depending on the mood the world’s in. It’s neutral ground, neither Heaven nor Hell can ever claim it.  
  
This is where he has dragged his battle.  
  
Ever since the Fall he has refused them, the hell beasts. Cast them out of his sight, banned their existence, waged a million pointless wars across the remote corners of this kingdom. All the effort put into the vain hope of not having to look at them and think _brother_.  
  
The last time he did, he carried heavenly weapons forged to cut through reality.   
  
This time he comes unarmed, apart from being the firm center of a storm that is the very vanguard of his might.  
  
“You know what to do,” Hell says. “You’ve got it in you.”  
  
Lucifer takes a step forward, into the raging horde.  
  
_Aim for the heart,_ he thinks when the first monster breathes down his neck.   
  
There's a shuffle of light. 

There's a sound at the back of his mind, memories trickling down. Knowledge forbidden, or merely hidden away. A scent of myrrh and honey, the taste of laughter in gilded halls. He remembers irreversible promises and godlike arrogance, remembers celestial bodies made for enduring the very end of the universe. They had been so sure. Lucifer, most of all.  
  
_I didn’t force you_ , he thinks. _You came willingly. I’m so sorry._  
  
There are faces, appearing quickly before his eyes; there are names, ancient syllables that nobody has spoken for eons. Imprints of the creatures they once were, flocking together in the land where the silver poplars rustle.  
  
“Go in peace,” he tells the dissolving darkness, the knot of warped bodies and sharp teeth and the dim light that remains of them. The blur of long-captured wings taking flight.  
  
He speaks their names, one by one, until the terrible noise has faded into the walls of the cavern.  
  
“They were never my creatures. They were always your punishment,” Hell says, tenderly. Then it adds, in a tone that he could only ever describe as _bitchy_ : “The Lilim has been trying to tell you that for eons. You’re not a great listener, Lucifer.”  
  
  
\---  
  
  
The hell spawn are gone and Hell still stands.  
  
Lucifer digs his fingers into the cold, hard soil and forces himself upright. It hurts, _Hell_ hurts, his universe is cracked and warped and the dimensions are a bit unaligned, he can feel it and knows he must put them right again, or they will flood each other. _Points for trying something new, eh, Dad?_  
  
“Stop pushing me away.” Chloe lands in the middle of a ruin with a soft plopping sound. Or a _swoosh_ , like a set of heavy curtains being opened or closed. “What was I saying-”  
  
“It’s not-”  
  
“No, I _mean_ it, Lucifer. It’s really damn hard to find you again and my GPS tracker doesn’t work down here.”  
  
“How can you even-” he cuts himself off; he can’t understand this, no matter how thoroughly he searches his memory for Hell lore or celestial teachings. He’s exhausted, too weary to even follow the broken logic in her being here, the hell spawn still moving around in his chest. “Never mind. You’re not real.”  
  
“What if I am?” When he moves away from her she follows, grabs his shoulder. “Lucifer, _stop walking_. Now that I’ve found you, hear what I have to say.”  
  
“Chloe.” He shakes his head, searches for his voice again. It seems to vanish. “It doesn’t matter what you have to say. You’re not real.”  
  
“Hey,” she snaps, her grip around his wrist tightens and her voice grows hard, smashing into him. “Look at me.”  
  
Her face moves closer, unbearably so, until he can see every hidden pattern on her face, sense each unburied secret she has ever kept. Souls are transparent down here, he wonders if she knows. Wonders, too, about the slight tremble of her lower lip as she studies the burn marks on his hands, frowning and humming. It makes him think of Linda’s grimacing compassion when she found out about his wings, makes him think of the long-winded sessions that followed. He sighs when Chloe runs a finger up across his palm, circling around his wrist. She smells of _life_ and Earth and he bows his head, wants to press his mouth to the lines some humans claim can foretell love and death. Wants to alter them, alter everything.  
  
“You’re _alive_ ,” he says but shakes his head at his own idiocy. “No, you can’t be. You’re- _no_.”  
  
In his memory, they tell him Father made her. A miracle, they say.  
  
He had ran away from that, too. _  
_  
It’s the birthmark on her neck, one that he hadn’t even noticed before. A trail of pale freckles scattered like the Plough. A new scar on one of her hands - a thin line between a knuckle and the soft flesh of her palm. She smiles and tells him the story behind it, a case-story that drags on, full of mundane matters and attention to detail and he looks at her, thinking _how could I ever make this up_ ? _There’s nobody like her anywhere at all._ _  
_ _  
_ _She’s not real._ _  
_  
“What if I _am_.” She answers his thoughts; he thinks nothing of it, he has stopped being surprised. Her hand on his chin, forcing him to look into her eyes. “ _Lucifer_. I love you. I mean, I _love_ you. What if it’s really me, down here, trying to get you back? What if I rode down here on my metaphorical white horse to bring you with me?”  
  
The concept makes him smile, it’s a rush of warmth into his bones, it thaws something deep inside the veins of his kingdom, its very heart. “What a knight in shining armour you’d make, Detective Decker.”  
  
“I know.” She laughs, quick and easy. “Lucifer. Do you trust me?”  
  
_Aim for the heart_ , he thinks again.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Do you trust me enough to do what I tell you?”  
  
He nods and Chloe’s arms come round his neck, her face rubbing against his throat. There’s a shiver jolting through her body and he keeps thinking of all the unimaginable things that Hell might do to a living soul; he tilts her head back and kisses her, desperate and full of hope and she digs her fingertips into the sore flesh on his arms, muttering her prosaic hymns into this wreck of a place, hissing what sounds like _unbind him, and let him go_ into the crackling, coiling void that surrounds them. There will be work to do here, later. A whole eternity's workload.   
  
For the moment, however, there is this human woman in his arms.   
  
“Now, Lucifer,” she says in a different tone altogether, taking a step back. “Now, we run.” _  
_  
She stands there, a solid spot of inexhaustible light in the ruins of his history and future and smiles at him. And Lucifer erases the space between his inconsistent body and the soul of Hell as he grabs Chloe’s hand and _runs_ .  
  
“Don’t be a stranger!” Hell shouts after him. “We have _so_ much redecorating to do!!”  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  


She wakes up to the gentle shifting of his body, his shoulder blades moving against her palms, his hands ghosting over the small of her back. She’s always unprepared for his touch, now in particular, unaccustomed to the way her nerves go haywire, quietly simmering right under her skin. Nothing else in the world touches her like he does.  
  
“Lucifer?” His name shivers in the heated air between them before it lands in the narrow space left between them. She brushes her lips over it, brushes light over his features as if she’s painting him in the colours of the sky. “Lucifer, are you awake?”  
  
“Mmm.”  
  
He stirs, opens his eyes and his mouth, just looking at her for a long time.  
  
“You were in Hell,” she says. “I didn’t think - I was so afraid -”  
  
Lucifer bows his forehead slightly so it touches hers, silencing the last of her doubts with his voice, the low murmur of it, the infinite tenderness as he speaks her name like every sound is a prayer.

“Your hair....” he murmurs, raising a hand to caress it, comb through it with careful fingers. “It smells of sulphur.”  
  
Tugging at his mouth she kisses the corners of it. “And you taste of apples.”  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> \--- “No, there are no special places in hell. Hell is a democracy.” Quote from the comics. As are the following: “Thunder only has one thing to say…”, “The Lord of Hell will do what he damn well likes”, and the cavern at the heart of the world.
> 
> \--- _crowd eternity into an hour, or stretch an hour into eternity_ is a quote from Lucifer in Lord Byron's play Cain: A mystery.
> 
> \--- _“Now that I’ve found you, hear what I have to say”_ and _“There’s nobody like him anywhere at all”_ are both quoted lines from Disney’s Snow White. As is _"Like to try it, hm? Go on, go on, have a bite."_
> 
> \--- _Unbind him, and let him go._ Yes, Lazarus-reference.
> 
> \--- The ending is an homage to a childhood favourite - _Mio, my Son_ by Astrid Lindgren. A high fantasy story where the villain Kato, a knight with a very literal heart of stone, eventually surrenders to Mio, telling him to please _aim for the heart_ because he cannot stand it chafing there, hurting him so much and Mio realises that nobody hates Kato more than Kato hates himself. Kato kept the souls/hearts of little children captive as birds in his castle, when he dies the white birds fly out and transform back into children. _The land where the silver poplars rustle_ is also a reference to this book.
> 
> \--- Ever since I read that the Evil Queen says “Snow white shall die even if it costs me my own life” I knew that I had to write Lucifer as both Snow and the Evil Queen, battling his own darkness.
> 
> \--- My headcanon is that Hell is some semi-internal version of the TARDIS. Sorry/not sorry about that.


End file.
